I have nothing to back this up but I think the way Newhart did things, with the main character being the normal one and everyone else being crazy, is more typical.
You all have surely overlooked the 1957-58 Tuesday night lineup on NBC:
- The George Gobel Show
- Dotto
- The Bob Cummings Show
- The Californians
mmm
Night Court was amusing, but nowhere near one of the best ever.
Newhart was the best of Bob Newhart’s shows. The Bob Newhart Show wasn’t bad, and in the end we learn the former was actually a spin off of the latter.
Having watched The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, which ran back to back on MeTV for a long time, I’m prepared to argue that Newhart was the better written of the two. However, TBNS had Suzanne Pleshette, who was a far better performer, and a far better character as Emily than Mary Frann as Newhart’s Joanna (or any other of the show’s characters who weren’t named Bob.) The strength of TBNS was the interplay between Bob and Emily.
As for the CBS vs. NBC lineups in general: Family Ties was the weakest of all the shows (take Michael J. Fox out and there’s no reason to watch) and Bill Cosby used up just about all of his really good ideas in the first season. Night Court pales in comparison to any of the CBS shows.
You forgot Three’s Company wedged between Lavern and Shirley and Taxi. That was the first “must see” lineup I remember. (By that time all of the shows in the OP were already in syndication…everyday of the week!)
This lineup was mentioned in the HBO doc on Mary Tyler Moore that aired last weekend. I was assuming that’s where it was brought @What_Exit 's mind.
Indeed, mentioned in the next post:
I think this is the biggest factor here. People forget how much more prevalent the “Family stays home” thing was back in the 70s. My parents rarely “went out” when we were kids. They played in a bowling league for a short while, but that was about it. Also, there were a lot fewer kid’s “activities” like families have now. My parents would have been completely boggled by the notion of driving each kid to multiple events almost every day. We had Scouts, and some little league baseball, and that was about it. Maximum once per week, and even that wasn’t very consistent. This was the pattern for most of the kids I knew.
Yeah, it’s what I get for not reading the whole thread.
For the record:
2008-2013: Breaking Bad
2007-2015: Mad Men
2011-2019: Game of Thrones
2010-2015: Justified
2010-2013: Spartacus
2010-2017: Sherlock
2010-2019: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Favorite of some)
2002-2015: Top Gear (original trio)
What record?
I watched those top shows on Saturday night when I was a teenager, then I’d go out looking for trouble like any other night.
It’s not like there were other things to watch on TV. I think we were up to 5 channels then, plus UHF which was slightly worse than watching TV in a snowstorm. Those would be the best shows on TV all week, not just that evening.
This is around the era when NBC started labeling their Thursday night lineup “Must See TV”, if I’m not mistaken.
ETA: It looks like they didn’t actually use that slogan until '93, but that was the time when they started the practice of putting all their best shows on Thursday night.
I forgot to give a specific year but 2011-2013 seems to have been pretty strong.
The big lineup I always think of started in 94 or 95 on Thursday nights:
Friends
some other show
Seinfeld
yet another other show
ER
Three shows that had huge cultural relevance for their time, and at least two of them that have had some real staying power, and are still watched 25+ years later. I’m sure I watched the other shows in H:30 slots, but I can’t remember what they were.
The biggest time competitor to TV is video games. It’s not necessarily that the kids and parents are out on Saturday night, but that they’re likely playing video games. There just wasn’t that competition for couch time in the 50s-70s. Even as far back as the 80s, Saturday night TV was likely to be a rental movie, and there are even more choices now.
Mine too. My babysitter was a pinball machine and a long-distance view of the TV in the bar.
For what? All of those shows are on different channels for the most part. The OP gave a list of shows on one channel’s lineup for one particular night - the ‘73-‘74 CBS Saturday night lineup.
I was able to watch them in any order, at my time of choosing, all on iTunes. If I wanted to watch them back-to-back on a Saturday, I could have done it.
I think it is pretty clear when you read the OP that “Tv lineup” means all the shows are from one network and on the same night, and not “here are some of my favorite shows”.